Following Saturday’s BLOG posting:

I got more e-mail about the Saturday Blog posting (August 8) than I had ever received before about anything I have written. Many readers said that what I wrote makes sense. A couple of people said they are afraid for my soul because they think I have tried to discredit Jesus. Perhaps the following will at least clarify what I think about the life of Jesus. I don’t mean this new writing to be an apology.

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JESUS - - Why I Am a Follower ... and Why I Go to Church

Deeply embedded in my subconscious are several phrases I learned as a child. “Jesus Loves me, this I know” and “Oh, How I Love Jesus” are two that I would not be able to rip out of my head, even if I wanted to do so. The words and the melodies are stuck in my brain. One of the songs speaks mystically of a Jesus who loves me and the other speaks of why I am obliged to love him. I am supposed to love Jesus because the Bible tells me he first loved me. Through many of the years of my adult life, phrases from the songs have surfaced to conscious awareness mostly as an emotional response to prompts in the liturgy, hymns, and sermons at church. Music, light streaming through beautiful windows and words combine in just the right way to create a special mood that at times can move me to tears. An occasional emotional bath is a good, cleansing, restorative experience; but remaining submerged in a comfortable, tepid bath for too long results in unattractive shriveling and wrinkling. Unfortunately, some poor souls I have know in church have been too long in the bath. For many the only experience they have of Jesus is a church experience, a highly charged emotional experience. Others, of course, have obviously found the Jesus experience to be far more than emotion. They have found meaning and purpose for their own lives in the life of a man who lived two thousand years ago. Typically they find Jesus more often outside the church than in it. I am one of those persons. I am a follower of Jesus... but the church, at best, is irrelevant to my being a follower. I don’t live in the church. I live in the world.

Somewhere along the way, through my young years and my middle years, I began to understand that there is more to Jesus than romance. He is more than “the other” in a love affair. When I was very young I thought his importance to me was that he saved me from an eternity in hell and ensured for me an everlasting life in heaven. Not at all suddenly, actually very gradually, I lost belief in a place called Heaven, a desired destination out there in the Cosmos; I more quickly dismissed the idea that there is a mysterious, horrible place of eternal damnation and suffering somewhere out or down there. Belief in either heaven or hell as destinations after death seems now to be patently ridiculous and inconsistent with the life and teachings of the man Jesus. I can’t remember when belief in a physical place after death slipped away from me, but it is as surely gone as the infantile belief in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. “Because the bible tells me so” is no longer a convincing reason to believe something that reason tells me does not make sense. I am convinced, contrary to what my parents and my teachers at church told me when I was a child, that the stories written about Jesus were not transcribed verbatim from God. I believe in the historical Jesus, but I don’t believe some of the stories about him that have been passed along through the centuries since his death actually happened. The writers who told his life story embellished their accounts with tales of water being turned to wine and of people being raised from the dead even after they had been in the grave long enough to begin to stink. The New Testament writers obviously thought they could make his life seem more valuable if they presented him as a kind of traveling magician. It must have seemed reasonable for them to think he would be more important to history if they presented him as a superhero whose inevitable death served a supernatural purpose. Perhaps they didn’t intend to do so, but their mystification of his death draws attention away from the much more important events of his life, away from his essential humanity. The routines and confusions of my everyday life are enriched by my knowing some of the details of his life. The details of his death, whether they are accurate or not, are sad reminders that sometimes very bad things happen to very good people. The individuals and groups who call themselves “fundamentalists” focus on his death as the important event in his life. The fundamentalist message stresses that the death of Jesus makes possible a free pass to heaven, a place described as the ultimate eternal holiday destination. The life of Jesus is much more important than that and much more valuable as an example of how to be fully human, hurting no one and helping in all the ways humanely possible to help people in need. The story of Jesus’ life is the ultimate parable. What a shame to make children believe, as I was urged to believe, that Jesus’ main task was to deliver the message from God that all persons are sinners destined for eternal damnation unless they “accept him (in his death) as their personal saviour.” A further uncomfortable caveat involves the institutional church: the rescued sinner must be baptized and sanctified for eternity by the church, the presumed keeper and guardian of the soul. As a matter of fact, very little is said about the church in the historical story of Jesus. The New Testament is a collection of stories told by several people and should properly be understood first as the stories of those writers and second as stories of the people about whom they write. We can try to glean from their writings enough bits and pieces to get a picture of the historical Jesus, but the whole process gets muddled because the church long ago interjected the idea that the Biblical writers were directly guided by God. Fundamentalist churches, including the Roman Catholic Church, place great emphasis on the Bible as the unadulterated written Word of God even though contradictions in the stories of the different writers are obvious to even a casual reader.

Jesus’ life is important because it is the perfect model for anyone who wants his/her life to be done right, lived meaningfully. He is my mentor. When I was young I misunderstood, and I thought he was a mysterious, magical third part of a god who took time out from whatever it was that he had been doing for all time before his birth to save my damned soul. I bought the whole preposterous explanation of his life story that was presented to me by the conservative church in which I was raised. Slowly at first, and then with stunning, swift insight I discovered Jesus’ complete humanness; and it is in his humanness, not his godliness, that my own life when I follow his example has a chance of being worth something. It is his life, not his death, that redeems me and teaches me how to live. My guess is that there have been more studies done and more books written about the search for a historical Jesus than about any other person in history. The obvious place to begin is the New Testament, a place where we’ve already been many times. The first Gospel begins with an accounting, including names of patriarchs, for the generations from Abraham to Jesus. By Matthew’s reckoning there are forty-two generations separating Abraham and Jesus, and there were said to be 30 generations between Adam and Abraham; so if Matthew had done the math all the way back past Noah to Adam, he would have believed Jesus was born seventy-two generations after the creation of the first man. (We’ll leave for another time the implications for the community of faith of leaving women’s names out of the figuring.) A modern generation is said to be about thirty years. We can guess that Matthew figured Jesus was born around two thousand years after Adam. After setting the birth of Jesus into what he considered an accurate time frame, Matthew tells the story of Jesus’ birth, which he calls the “birth of the Messiah.” Although Matthew doesn’t go into details, we learn from him that Mary and Joseph were not yet married when Mary became pregnant. In Middle Eastern cultures even today, marriages are commonly a matter of a contract agreement between the parents of the bride and the parents of the groom or between an older groom and the parents of a young woman. That was almost certainly the case with Mary and Joseph. We can forget the hollywood movie presentations of a lovely young woman meeting a handsome slightly older man at the village well and falling deeply in love with him. As was the custom, Joseph’s parents would have begun keeping track of all the girls who might become eligible to be their son’s bride, beginning when the girls were about eight-years-old. By fourteen or fifteen, his parents would have settled on a suitable girl and would have approached her parents to petition for a marriage contract. The marriage would come later. Mary became pregnant between the time of the petition and the actual marriage, and Matthew tells us that Joseph was understandably unhappy with the situation. He wanted out of the contract but, being a good man, he was willing to set the contract aside quietly. Divine intervention came in the form of an angel who told Joseph he should take Mary home to be his wife because it was “by the holy spirit” that she had conceived the child. Joseph was told they should name the child “Jesus.” Matthew doesn’t tell the sweet, comforting story of the annunciation that inspired Renaissance artists many centuries later. We go to the Gospel of Luke for those details. First, Luke addresses his story of the life of Jesus to one Theophilus, a person not clearly identified but important enough to be called “your Excellency”; and writes that his purpose in writing is to provide a connected narrative based on authentic knowledge drawn from “traditions” handed down by the original eyewitnesses and “servants of the Gospel.”

The Gospel of Luke tells the story of a young girl, Mary, visited by an Angel named Gabriel six months after a similar visitation to the husband of Elizabeth, an elder cousin of Mary’s. The angel, who says his regular job is to “stand in attendance upon God,” told Zechariah that his wife Elizabeth, who was thought to be beyond child-bearing age, must have a son. After a little discussion about his wife’s advanced age, Zechariah is told by Gabriel that he is to “go in to her” and that she would become pregnant with a boy whom they must name John. The boy, of course, grew up to be John the Baptist. In Luke’s elaborate account Gabriel visits Mary instead of Joseph. The things she is told became the inspiration for all those Renaissance paintings of the Annunciation. It is Luke’s account of the birth of Jesus that is usually read at Christmas time.

The Gospel of Mark skips over Jesus’ birth and early childhood and begins with his baptism by John in the Jordan River. Mark’s account of the baptism is as dramatic as Luke’s birth story. “At the moment when he came up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn open and the Spirit, like a dove, descending upon him. And a voice spoke from heaven: ‘Thou art my Son, my Beloved; on you my favor rests.’” Immediately following the baptism, Mark has Jesus being sent by the Spirit “away into the wilderness” where he is tempted by Satan. According to Mark, while Jesus was in the desert the angels waited on him. Mark doesn’t tell us where he got his information; but we are left to assume, as modern-day fundamentalist Christian’s believe, that God told him what happened so he could write it down. In his account of the life of Jesus Matthew also includes baptism and temptation by Satan. The scenes are described quite differently by the two writers, but the gist is the same. At the Jordan River, Matthew says The Baptist at first declines to perform the rite saying it was he who should be baptized by Jesus. Jesus insists that he must be baptized by John saying, “we do well to conform in this way with all that God requires.” Matthew’s account also includes the opening of the heavens with a dove descending and alighting on Jesus and a voice from heaven declaring, “This is my Son, my Beloved, on whom my favor rests.” Matthew’s temptation story isn’t set just in a wilderness. He says the devil took Jesus to Jerusalem and “set him on the parapet of the temple” where he challenged Jesus to show himself to be the Son of God by throwing himself off the high place so angels will swoop down and rescue him. When the devil couldn’t get Jesus to do that, he took him out to a high mountain from which he could see “all the kingdoms of the world in their glory.” The devil said he would give Jesus all these kingdoms if he would worship him. Jesus refused, sent Satan away, and was ministered to by angels. There was a time in my middle age when I felt duped, tricked. Some of my Sunday School teachers didn’t have the academic background nor the inclination to think critically about what they had been taught and what they had read, but I assumed the church leaders who had been trained at seminary had made a conscious decision to ignore scientific and historical evidence and to say they believed “in their hearts” what they didn’t believe intellectually. I was convinced that The Apostles Creed and other significant shared statements of belief defied reason and that my reciting them as I had done since I was a child was dishonest. For a time I mentally crossed my fingers as I said them in unison with other worshipers, then I entered a period when I edited the creeds leaving out statements of belief I no longer shared with other congregants. Now I am in a more comfortable place in my thinking about the creeds and about public worship. I am not upset or angry or disappointed to know that much of what I thought was “Gospel truth” didn’t happen. I understand how thoroughly impressed Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were with the man called Jesus because I am impressed. They lived and wrote at a time when Greek and Roman secular cultures had evolved over centuries around ideas about powerful gods who lived apart from human society but played significant roles in everyday life. The writers of the New Testament were thoroughly educated in Hebrew culture and history, so there was nothing unusual about a burning bush that talked or angels who visited ordinary people with messages of good and bad news from a powerful, sometimes angry god. As they were writing, they didn’t know that what they were writing would become the stuff of idolatry. They did what people down through the ages have done. They told stories. I very much doubt that they would have been flattered to know their stories and letters would become objects of worship. How could they have known their writings would be included in a collection of stories that people would revere and worship as the literal utterances of God? My good Mother wouldn’t allow any other book or any object to placed on top of the Bible in our house. It was holy. I heard in church and at home that it was the Holy Bible. It said so right on the cover of the book. Who was I to doubt!

Matthew tells us about the “calling” of the fishermen brothers, Peter and Andrew, and the sons of Zebedee, James and John, who were also fishermen. He doesn’t tell us what they were called to do, but we can assume Matthew meant us to know that these men were not mere sycophants or smitten fans of a charismatic personality. They must have had duties. Perhaps they helped with crowd control. Maybe they were advance men who went ahead and arranged venues for Jesus’ public meetings. Without telling the stories until later in his narrative, Matthew says simply that sufferers of many kinds were brought to him, and he cured them. He doesn’t begin to tell stories until after he has laid out the “teaching” of Jesus, a guide for living that includes what we know as The Sermon on the Mount and a collections of sayings about what to do and what not to do in practical life situations. In Chapter Eight Matthew begins telling the stories of individuals: a leper is cured; the paralyzed and sick son of a centurion is healed; a fever is lifted from his disciple Peter’s mother-in-law. The pace of miraculous happenings picks up as Jesus goes about taming unruly nature and curing people. By the end of chapter eight, Matthew’s narrative moves quickly from one story of miraculous healing to another. We see vividly two mentally ill men coming menacingly “out of the tombs” toward Jesus. Matthew says matter-of-factly that the men were possessed by devils, demons who talk to Jesus and ask to be driven from the men into a herd of pigs. Jesus “casts” the demons into the pigs, and the pigs rush into a lake and are drowned. Throughout Matthew’s narrative, Instructions to disciples are interspersed among the stories of miracles. In my old age I feel little need to be entertained by stories of miracles. I do, however, need help navigating my way through the pitfalls and hazards inevitable in the final years of my life. I find it useful to study the life of Jesus, even though his life was much shorter than mine is turning out to be. I find it helpful to set aside the magic in the story, as Thomas Jefferson once did by selecting out of the four Gospels what he believed to be the words of Jesus and combining them into one narrative. Like Jefferson, I am interested in “the very words only of Jesus.” Jefferson writing to John Adams said, “There will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.” It is this benevolent code of morals that I need to help me navigate my way responsibly through the rest of my life. Unfortunately the church continues to urge me to say in unison with other congregants and with a straight face the Apostles’ Creed, which I doubt most people in the congregation actually believe from beginning to end:

I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth; And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord: who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried; he descended to the dead. The third day he rose from the dead; he ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

I believe in the Holy spirit, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Amen.

I will probably continue to go to church. I will listen. I will not be persuaded to set aside or leave at home my ability nor my inclination to think critically about absolutely everything. I will most definitely continue to like very much what I know for sure about the man Jesus who lived two thousand years ago.